A coming of age memoir of a girl discovering her lesbianism at the same moment she is learning that her obsessive-compulisive, tyrannical father was a closeted homosexual. They story line sounds like a novel in part because Bechdel sees her childhood through the lens of fictional analysis. That left me disconcerted to be reading a graphic novel with references to Proust, Joyce, the Odyssey, Greek mythology, Henry James, Collette, and so on. To the extent I could follow the literary references I was moved by the author’s transparent, often painful, honesty about her life. The book triumphs as a graphic novel precisely because it combines the genres of high literature with a comic book.
